The Awareness Center closed. We operated from April 30, 1999 - April 30, 2014. This site is being provided for educational & historical purposes.
We were the international Jewish Coalition Against Sexual Abuse/Assault (JCASA); and were dedicated to ending sexual violence in Jewish communities globally. We did our best to operate as the make a wish foundation for Jewish survivors of sex crimes. In the past we offered a clearinghouse of information, resources, support and advocacy.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

No folds barred

How does a deeply religious artist explore sensuality?
With fabric, photographs and a pomegranate, reveals Ellie Levenson

In the Hassidic Jewish community of Stamford Hill in
north London, artists are as rare as women who work outside the home. So
to find a woman artist living here is particularly unusual. But then, by
her own admission, Gitl Wallerstein-Braun is "unorthodox orthodox". Now aged
57, she graduated from London's Central Saint Martins last year and is already
achieving international success with her photographs of her sculptures.

Braun moved to Britain in 1973, but didn't speak any
English until 12 years ago. She only took language lessons after a row in
the community over whether to involve the authorities in a child abuse case.
Her family, who backed bringing in the authorities rather than letting the
community sort things out internally, were shunned by many. Braun, who spoke
only Hebrew and Yiddish, found that the people she had relied on for
communication would no longer talk to her.

This silence was not new for her. The child of Holocaust
survivors (her father was in the Bor labour camp in Yugoslavia, her mother
in Auschwitz), silence was the overwhelming feature of her childhood, some
of it spent in an orphanage. "My parents didn't talk about the past," she
says, "but it was very present. It was a silent upbringing. You didn't question,
you didn't ask. You just obeyed."

Braun then took an art foundation course, first drawing
landscapes of Israel from memory, then moving on to the Kent coast, using
thick paint and pastels, playing with senses and texture by mixing scent
and other materials into the paint. These pictures impressed Central Saint
Martins enough for her to be offered a place. Was art college a culture shock?
"No," she says. "I was already familiar with 28 different cultures from my
English class. I felt this is who I am and I am proud. It's like a mirror.
If others see you are proud, they refer to you in that way. Anyway, in a
place like London, which is so multicultural, people don't question
anything."

As part of her studies, Braun looked at the work of
renowned Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac, who captured Jewish
lives in 1930s Germany, publishing the shots that hadn't been confiscated
or destroyed in a book entitled The Vanished World. "I looked at those, and
at my husband's collection of art depicting life in the Jewish ghetto, and
I thought to myself, 'It's not vanished.' So I started taking pictures of
my community, of my neighbour's children and then weddings. I was documenting
Jewish life - but present life, not past."

Braun's current work involves photographing fabric,
in a style she calls photographic sculpture. Fabric is used to create folds
and lines, which are then photographed. The results are extremely sensual,
at times erotic, depicting both landscapes and the body at the same time,
allowing Braun to explore sensuality without compromising her position as
a religious woman. "There's more freedom in the ambiguity," she says. "You
can be much more explicit. In fact, fabric has always been a way for women
in the community to express themselves, with embroidery being used as coverings
for challah (bread) and, in the synagogue, for the Torah."

The material also gets across the silence that Braun
has often felt. "The fabric has become my language," she says. "I started
to become aware that photography is like fiction. You can see the expression
of a second, but you cannot tell the whole story. So I started to find my
voice beyond the photo. I had a photograph of my womb that the doctor took
for me after my hysterectomy. I wanted it because it's a kind of loss, as
I had so many children [10, two of whom died]. It was Sukkot [a Jewish harvest
festival], and we had hung up a pomegranate. I looked at the photograph of
my womb and the pomegranate and saw a resemblance, so I covered the pomegranate
with fabric and photographed it. Eventually, I removed the pomegranate and
kept the fabric, which is how my work with fabric as a metaphor for the body
came about."

For Braun, this is just continuing a tradition best
expressed by painters like Caravaggio. "I was looking at his painting Doubting
Thomas, where the fabric folds mirror the folds of the skin. I saw how the
fabrics mirror the body in many paintings." Her photographic sculpture of
fabric formed the centre of her graduation show, which led to an exhibition
earlier this year at the Riccardo Giaccherini gallery in London.

Two shows in Israel are in the pipeline, the first
at the Wolfson Museum in Jerusalem this November, the second at the Israel
Museum in 2008. But it is perhaps a planned exhibition next month at the
Jagonari Women's Educational Resource Centre in London's East End that is
most remarkable, the centre being situated in Whitechapel, a predominately
Bengali area. The aim is to bring out the similarities between the Bengali
and Jewish communities, and their shared history as immigrant communities
in east London.

Braun is particularly pleased about this: "The higher
purpose of art is to bring people together." This belief is particularly
ironic, given that it was her being shunned by her own community that spurred
her into developing her talent. "I was interviewed by a journalist for a
Jewish paper, and they asked why I started to create art. How could I say
that you made me do it, you forced me?" Braun's resilience has, however,
allowed her to build bridges. "You have to struggle against the system to
make it," she says, "but when you make it, they want you - because you are
an asset."

Subscribe to The Awareness Center's Newsletter

Translate

Survivors ARE Heroes!

The Awareness Center believes ALL survivors of sex crimes should be given yellow ribbons to wear proudly.

Survivors of sexual violence (as adults and/or as a child) are just as deserving of a yellow ribbon as the men and women of our armed forces, who have been held captive as hostages or prisoners of war.

Survivors of sexual violence have been forced to learn how to survive, being held captive not by foreigners, but mostly by their own family members, teachers, camp counselors, coaches babysitters, rabbis, cantors or other trusted authority figures.

For these reasons ALL survivors of sexual violence should be seen as heroes!